The Sunday Times, 
In June 1939 King George VI told William Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, that he “would never wish to appoint Churchill to any office unless it were absolutely necessary in time of war”. He gave the example of Gallipoli, an operation that was one of the great allied disasters of the First World War, as showing Winston Churchill’s lack of judgment.
Churchill’s support for King Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor) during the abdication crisis in 1936 may have been another reason for King George’s disdain. Churchill had been the most prominent figure promoting a morganatic (unofficial) marriage between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, which most establishment figures had considered impossible under British law and practice.

Yet at 6pm on May 10, 1940 the King sent for Churchill. “His Majesty received me most graciously and bade me sit down,” Churchill later wrote in his war memoirs. “He looked at me searchingly and quizzically for some moments and then said, ‘I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?’ Adopting his mood, I replied, ‘Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.’ He laughed and said, ‘I want to ask you to form a government.’ I said I would certainly do so.’”
This charming anecdote, in which the King makes a light joke of the profound importance of appointing a wartime premier while the Germans were invading Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, has always been accepted at face value. However, it is now clear from the King’s own diary that he genuinely thought Churchill did not know why he had been sent for and took seriously Churchill’s reply to what Churchill had thought was a joke.
“I sent for Winston and asked him to form a government,” the King noted. “This he accepted and told me that he had not thought this was the reason for my having sent for him.”
The King’s diary from this time — now available to historians for the first time in its entirety — turns out to be a treasure trove of information, particularly on how the King changed his initial hostility towards Churchill into an attitude of high regard, trust and ultimately, in the King’s own words, friendship.
After more than 70 years the emergence of this exciting new historical source allows us fresh insights into the mind of Churchill while he was, in his own words, “walking with destiny”.
The diary relates how the King invited the wartime premier for lunch every Tuesday. A recent prime minister has likened the weekly audience with the monarch to lying on a psychiatrist’s couch at the end of a long and busy day and being able to share thoughts and feelings that were politically impossible to express in public. Churchill certainly used George VI like that, respecting his counsel and his total discretion.
He regularly vouchsafed emotions to George VI that were otherwise seen only by his wife, Clementine, and his deputy private secretary, Jock Colville.
The King and Churchill had little in common beyond a joint love of the Royal Navy, in which the King had served in the Great War and Churchill had been first lord of the admiralty, and the fact that both had been medically treated for voice impediments — the King by Lionel Logue for his stammer and Churchill, as a young officer, by Sir Felix Semon for his lisp.
During the struggle over appeasement — the policy in the 1930s of giving Adolf Hitler what he wanted to keep the peace — the King had wholeheartedly supported Neville Chamberlain, then prime minister, against Churchill, even inviting Chamberlain onto the Buckingham Palace balcony when he returned from Munich in September 1938. It was the most unconstitutional act of any monarch in the 20th century, since both opposition parties were against the agreement.
Churchill advised against sending the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, pictured in 1941, abroad to escape a possible German invasion
Churchill advised against sending the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, pictured in 1941, abroad to escape a possible German invasionMARCUS ADAMS/PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
When in May 1940 it seemed as though Churchill might become prime minister in succession to Chamberlain, the King suggested that the experienced foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, have his peerage “placed in abeyance” so that he could sit in the House of Commons as prime minister. But events moved too fast for any constitutional innovations.
Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg on the West at dawn on Friday, May 10, 1940, and that same evening — after German forces invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg — Chamberlain tendered his resignation. “It is most unfair on Chamberlain to be treated like this after all his good work,” the King wrote in his diary. “The Conservative rebels ought to be ashamed of themselves for deserting him at this moment.”
Churchill did not arrive at the palace unprepared for the prime ministership. The King records: “He had thought it possible of course and gave me some of the names of people he would ask to join his government. He was full of fire and determination to carry out the duties of prime minister.”
The King was unhappy with some of the appointments Churchill wanted to make. The appointment of the newspaper publisher Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production drove the King to write a note of protest, but Churchill insisted on his right to choose him. Similarly, complaints arose from Buckingham Palace when Churchill asked for his cabinet minister friend Brendan Bracken to join the privy council, which Churchill similarly waved away.
However, as the war progressed, the two men drew together and Churchill quickly became the only one of the King’s four prime ministers to be addressed by his Christian name. Within a fortnight of becoming prime minister, Churchill had to warn the King of the likelihood of having to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.
“The prime minister came at 10.30pm,” noted the King on May 23. “He told me that he would have to order the BEF back to England. This operation would mean the loss of all guns, tanks, ammunition and all stores in France. The question was whether we could get the troops back from Calais and Dunkirk. The very thought of having to order this movement is appalling as the loss of life will probably be immense.”
Five days later he added: “The idea of losing [the BEF commander-in-chief, General Lord] Gort and his band, all the flower and youth of our country, the army’s backbone, in officers and men is truly tragic.”
“The invasion of this country comes next in the German programme,” Churchill told the King on June 12, two days before the Germans entered Paris.
After he delivered his Finest Hour speech on June 18, the King noted of Churchill: “He looked tired and was depressed over France. But he was full of fight over this country. I talked to him about E [Elizabeth, the present Queen] and MR [Margaret Rose] being a liability in case of invasion. He said ‘No.’” Churchill believed that to send the princesses to Canada would damage morale.
On the evening that the French signed the armistice with Germany on June 22, Churchill had a long audience with both the King and Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother. He told them that the Richelieu, France’s newest battleship, had put out to sea from Dakar and “her destination would either be Plymouth or Davy Jones’s locker”.
“He is furious with France,” the King recorded. “Why should we be polite to her after her behaviour to us? Broken her word and her alliance and her fleet all over the place. We are now alone in the world waiting. A critical three months and then the winter . . . He said the war cabinet represented all three parties and were as one, all in favour of fighting.”
They then discussed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had fled Paris for their home in the south of France, on their way to Spain. Churchill saw this as a potentially calamitous decision, putting the duke in possible danger of capture by the Germans. If he returned to Britain, Churchill added, the duke would “have no following here”.
“We must guard against his becoming champion of the disgruntled,” the King noted in his diary. “We told him we could not meet ‘her’,” by whom he meant the duchess. When the duke was appointed governor of the Bahamas, the King wrote in his diary, in a slighting reference to the twice-divorced American Duchess of Windsor: “I don’t think the Bahaman ladies will be best pleased!”
“If we go down under Germany’s onslaughts,” Churchill told the King on July 10, “our reserves will be of no use to us, but if we can withstand them, the United States must come to our aid.”
His sense of frustration at the minimal help he felt the Americans were giving Britain was not something he could ever express publicly, but which crops up often in these diaries. “After a year of war,” the King reported of Churchill in early September, “he felt more confident about our position today. In the Battle for Britain in the air, he thought Germany were using a larger percentage of their air force than we were. We are using one-third of our fighter force.”
The Duchess of Windsor: French exile
The Duchess of Windsor: French exileJOHN RAWLINGS/GETTY IMAGES
The first of their weekly Tuesday lunches was on September 10. Because of the sensitivity of the matters discussed, they served themselves from a sideboard so no servants needed to be present.
Churchill entrusted the King with important wartime secrets, including the Ultra signals intelligence being worked on at Bletchley Park, knowing there would be no leaks. “Hitler could and should have invaded this country after Dunkirk,” he told the King on October 1, “leaving the advance into Paris until later. The French could not have prevented Germany from doing so.”
In mid-October, Churchill recounted to the King how “he had saved his cook and those in the kitchen” at No 10 by telling them to go to the air-raid shelter a matter of moments before a bomb exploded. The King, who knew Churchill would often go out onto the roof of the Air Ministry during raids, appealed to him not to take such risks, reflecting in his diary: “I cannot afford to lose him nor can the country at this moment.” Rather eccentrically, Churchill gave the King a siren suit (to be worn in air-raid shelters) for Christmas 1940 and the Queen a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
In May 1941 Churchill told the King he was considering sacking General Archibald Wavell, commander of British forces in north Africa, and replacing him with General Claude Auchinleck. He had not even informed the war cabinet by then.
“There has been some criticism that Winston does things too much himself,” the King wrote, “but he has to and is full of energy and initiative. I wish we had more people of his calibre.”
Over the sacking of Wavell, the King wrote: “I find that when Winston has made up his mind about somebody or something, nothing will change his opinion. Personal feelings are nothing to him, though he has a very sentimental side to his character. He looks to one goal and one goal only: winning the war. No half measures.”
On the night of May 10, 1941 Rudolf Hess, the deputy führer of Germany, parachuted onto the Scottish estate of the Duke of Hamilton to make a peace offer.
Churchill was amused when Hamilton, who had never met Hess, told him that Hess had chosen to fly to him because he was lord steward of His Majesty’s household, which Hess took to be a real rather than an honorific title, and therefore Hamilton would be able to urge his idea upon the King.
“My lord steward, Hamilton, has only been appointed for a year,” the King noted in his diary. “I had to ask Walter [the 8th Duke of] Buccleuch, his predecessor, to leave owing to his sympathy with the Nazis. Perhaps the post of lord steward is bewitched or is it Germanised.”
At lunch Churchill joked to the King that “he would be very angry if Beaverbrook or Anthony Eden suddenly left here and flew off to Germany without warning”. He said of Hess’s peace offer, “Hitler to have a free hand in Europe, but he could not negotiate with the present British government” and jokingly asked the King whether he “was sure I did not wish him to resign just when things looked brighter for us”.
Something that made the future even brighter was the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck on May 27. “He was delighted with the sinking of the Bismarck as it makes our Atlantic position better,” the King reported, “in that we only have the Tirpitz to deal with now.”
On June 5 he noted: “He has high hopes for Libya as we have the troops, tanks and the aircraft all ready for the thrust. He wants Wavell [who was to be sacked by Churchill in July] to wage a ruthless advance against the Germans and really press them hard giving them no time for rest or sleep.”
The same month, after the allied defeat in Greece, Churchill told the King: “Our leaving there is not a major disaster. It is a battle fought in a campaign and should be treated as such.”
Two days after Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941 Churchill said to the King: “What a chance for the USA to come into the war now; a heaven-sent opportunity.” To his deep irritation, the Americans made no moves to get involved.
When the Japanese launched their devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawaii, in December 1941, Churchill’s predictions were proved wildly wrong. Nonetheless, with the Americans now in the war, he recognised that it would be won.
Churchill’s lonely walk with destiny in 1940 and 1941 had been made considerably easier by George VI, who provided precisely the kind of advice, encouragement and warning to his prime minister that the constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot had famously prescribed as the monarch’s duty.
When in February 1952 Churchill was told of the King’s death, he burst into tears, telling his private secretary: “Bad news? The worst!” He then wrote a note saying “For Valour” that was placed on the King’s coffin.
It was the motto of the Victoria Cross and a reference not just to the King’s service at the Battle of Jutland but also to his steadfastness in Britain’s darkest and finest hour.
Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts will be published on Thursday by Allen Lane, £35